It's either very funny or very depressing to watch executives trip over themselves to prove who has the worst understanding of what software development actually entails.

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@cloudhop in
my humble opinion: better type systems, yes;

more type annotations and type syntax: no

[bri7@social.treehouse.systems]

@cloudhop more types does not lead to better types

[cloudhop@equestria.social]

@bri7 See, it's hard to explain to people that you need a much more complex and powerful type system in order to *reduce* type annotations precisely because of unsolved problems surrounding inference algorithms (which is precisely what broke our first attempt). For some reason most people seem to think "better types" means "more type annotations" and I'm not sure how to explain the difference.

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@cloudhop what does he... how...

[elexia@catcatnya.com]

@jacel @cloudhop @xgranade if you have money you can afford to fail so many times

[timwardcam@c.im]

@geospacedman @cloudhop I have often wished that I could restrict my hiring of software engineers to people who could actually touch type (they're more likely to write things like comments and documentation) but sadly that would have limited the available pool. We're talking about the days when typing lessons in schools were only offered to girls, and most software engineers were boys.

[timwardcam@c.im]

@julesbl @cloudhop That was done for a while. Programmers wrote by hand onto coding forms which "punch girls" typed onto punched cards.

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@julesbl @cloudhop
That was actually common practice in the 1960s and early-mid 1970s. The people who did the typing were called "keypunch operators". Programmers would hand-print their programs on coding forms.
It may have been the case that most programmers did not have typing skills, but that was not the primary force driving that method of computer usage, and it certainly did not make programming faster.

[timwardcam@c.im]

@Lacey @cloudhop Not me. I was taught to touch type by a professional typing teacher (my mother).

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@TomF @cloudhop
I'm glad I learned to touch-type. At the time (around 1977), my junior high school actively discouraged boys from taking typing class, because that was "women's work". I was already using computers by hunt-and-peck typing, but my motivation wasn't primarily about speeding up typing. I was already well aware that a much greater portion of the process, and time spent on it, was thinking.

[brouhaha@mastodon.social]

@TomF @cloudhop
I'd hoped that touch typing would reduce my cognitive load (though I didn't know that term), making it easier to concentrate on the programming, and less on the typing. It did that somewhat, although I had already gotten so good at hunt-and-peck that it really wasn't as much change as I'd expected.

[krazov@mstdn.social]

@interru @cloudhop Also, articulating that intent to LLM is done by typing, as well.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@brouhaha @cloudhop Also, if you're writing code, all the punctuation means you're moving your hands almost as much as hunt-n-peck anyway.

[tomf@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@brouhaha @cloudhop Of course I'm not really "hunt-n-peck" as such - I use three fingers on the left hand and four on the right. But it's in a random-ass way I made up myself, with a lot of hand movement.

[miawinter@tech.lgbt]

@cloudhop "30% of all sewing is now done by our interns, this means our workers are no longer constraint by how fast they can change out the threads in their sewing machines anymore but by how clearly they can tell the interns to do it for them"

[cstross@wandering.shop]

@cloudhop More classically for software engineering, per Fred Brooks (1975): "one woman can produce a baby in nine months but nine women cannot produce a baby in one month".

[kwramm@mastodon.gamedev.place]

@cloudhop I knew it! Having taken a typing class over that expensive Comp Sci degree was the right choice! /s

[gilesgoat@toot.wales]

@AbramKedge @cloudhop My personal experience goes that coding often involves "quite some time" staring at code that is already there/thinking maybe even 2 ..3 days like that touching few lines at the time. Then you start getting "the new ideas" and could be a few days of "code this and that rinse and repeat" only finally you get "the moment" where maybe you can even write 5000 lines of code in a few hours where 4995 will be correct and 5 will take 2 weeks to debug

[abramkedge@beige.party]

@gilesgoat @cloudhop my cube was outside the VP of Engineering's office. For weeks I saw him quietly fuming as he walked past. Often I'd be sketching ideas on a whiteboard, or sitting back staring at it with my feet up on a filing cabinet. Four o'clock each afternoon I disappeared off to the war room to chat with the other three system architects.

Sometimes he saw me actually typing into a code editor. "How's it going?"

"Pretty good - I've got the data structures locked down, most of the function headers in place, just working on the state machine now."

"So no code yet?"

"Not yet."

The code worked the first time it was flashed into the fpga prototype, reading and writing data to a RAM disk. In three months from the start of the project, we were booting Windows from that prototype.

For comparison, the previous ground-up firmware project took 18 months to get to the same point. Code-first only *feels* faster.

[gilesgoat@toot.wales]

@AbramKedge @cloudhop To me coding 'unless I start already with some developed idea in mind' of course always involves quite a bit of thinking/re-watching some code I already done. I tend to 'split a big problem into a set of smaller problems' and work/test them one by one before to attempt "the big merge". Sometime I quickly type things in the editor as 'they are quick ideas I want to test' that then after much rework can turn into real functional code. Erm do I see a brony here ?